Man your pumps, Wetherspoons are coming

I also don't buy into the tired old narrative of "English pubs bad", "Irish pubs, good".

It's just not true, in my experience. Most Irish pubs are just as shlte as most English pubs, as far as I'm concerned. Pubs that I really like are few and far between in both countries.

yeah, the wetherspoons experience as such, is not great in terms of pub “atmosphere”

yeah would agree with this. You'll find some cracking pubs in both countries but also some absolute dives as well. I think there was a time about 10-15 years back when the service was generally far better in Irish pubs than the UK because they hired actual barmen. I remember one regular haunt and you could nod at the barmen 15 metres across the room and they would send down your next round of pints from memory of the previous order. Now they've McDonaldised the job and its more likely to be a student on minimum wage who struggles to pull a good pint and wont remember what you ordered 30 minutes previous. The wages Irish publicans pay their staff have gone down meaning service levels have gone down, all the while the prices of drink have kept going up.

Was in a pub there a couple of weeks back with five mates and at the end of the night one of them remarked about how we had dropped over 250 euro in the till over the course of the evening yet when you went into the jacks it was manky dirty and there was no soap and no hot water out of the tap. Its incredible to think that even given the prices they're charging publicans would still begrudge you a bit of soap and hot water. Yet it is common enough in a good few Irish pubs.

Not all Irish pubs are like that, many are spotlessly clean and run very well. But the dives with sticky carpets do exist here just as they exist in the UK. When I lived in London locally we had a Spoons and Greene King both of which were dives. But we also had another 3 pubs locally that were great places to drink, real friendly community type pubs that hadnt changed in decades. So to me you get a mix of both types of pub in the UK but you can get that here just as much as well.

I looked very hard and in a lot of cities it was pretty awful. I know plenty of Irish pubs are crap and the publican doesn't really try with the beer but at least it's his pub and you are not going from town to town from Spoons to Spoons. Even the well run pubs in England I can't warm to as they are too big, bright and open usually.

I don't mind the idea of having a Spoons mixed in with the other pubs in an Irish city but I would hate to be at the point where it's all Spoons and All Bar One like the UK.

Because there's only one model for English pubs? They're all the same?

Yup, the tired old, prejudiced, trope is alive and well.

Three Tun Tavern is now for sale:

Do any of them have music playing here?

No issue with TV but I do like a tune in the background

I watched the rugby on the tv in blanch spoons last year

Ah sorry I thought it was a kids these days kinda rant

Lots of pub companies in England have either no TVs or terrestrial only and a few like Spoons and Sam Smiths won't have music due to not wanting to pay licenses etc.

Not sure why policy would be different in Ireland but maybe they realized that it's just much more the done thing here compared to England

Hard to believe that Dun Laoire was/is a busier spot than Blackrock.Walk a mile between bars in DL? And the clientele in DL,dodgy isn't the word.But BK dead for a few years with closures.

And generally no sound unless it's sports. Muted on Sky News is the default.

We had to show the news in one pub I worked in if there was no sport on.

Customers and staff got quite weird if I put on any 24hr news channel that wasn't Sky ( pre RTE news launch )

Sky News is FTA, 'spoons won't be paying a penny for it.

Indo did a largely positive review of the new pub and hotel here, she says the restoration is an excellent job

https://www.independent.ie/life/travel/reviews/hotel-reviews/hotel-review-pints-from-345-and-a-rich-restoration-at-wetherspoons-new-irish-hotel-40837089.html

Interesting as well that it says the hotel rooms are 150 at the weekends and 100 during the week but also that kids stay for free and can use a sofa bed in a family room. Anyone know what other hotels are doing, what would a family room cost with 2 kids? From the photos the rooms look decent enough.

Real ale is a pain compared to keg beer in terms of storage and shelf life and you can genuinely get "a bad pint" (not like fella who claims to get bad Guinness) if the manager does the slightest thing wrong.

It will never be a thing outside British pubs

Yes I'm aware they are what I meant by British pubs what I am saying is it is not something that will ever catch on in other Irish pubs even the craft ones. Cask Marque is also a gimmick and doesn't mean the staff on site are doing things correctly.

The new stand up ale systems make life a lot easier but still need floor space and staff you can trust not to be moving them about once vented and also someone who knows when is the right time to vent as the old keg gets low.

Generally it's quite a poor product which is why it exists only in it's home nation.

I didn't realize that many were doing it in Dublin so maybe I'm wrong on that one. Do you know were they doing it on pump or bar top cask ?

Must be all Dublin. I've moved out from Galway city now but when I was living there up to five years ago no pub would touch cask.

I offered to help any of the craft beer pubs that popped up around that time as I had plenty of experience from my time running pubs in the UK but the response was either it would be too much trouble or it wouldn't sell.

I've had the odd pint in the Galway Bay pubs but quality and price are all over the place.